Just some upcoming shows.

Some recent quick and cheap band posters for upcoming shows.

Nick Cave interview

Nick Cave get heavy here.

Not a lot of posting lately, been busy with lots of stuff. Hopefully I’ll pick it back up in Sept.

Portfolio Updates!

Just dropped a bunch of new imagery into the portfolio. Lots of renders and retouching to check out.

Nike Pledged to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint. It Just Slashed the Staff Charged With Making That Happen.

Ouch. Gnarly reporting by ProPublica here.

“So it came as a surprise one Sunday night in December when the dozen or so people on the team got summoned to a mandatory meeting the next morning. In a Zoom call before sunrise, they learned why. The team was being eliminated. The vice president who ran the team was gone. The call lasted less than 10 minutes.

It was the first in a series of deep cuts that one former Nike employee called “the sustainability bloodbath.”

With sales flatlining, Nike executives in December announced a plan to cut costs by $2 billion over three years. Those cuts have dealt a big blow to Nike’s sustainability workforce.

Nike has laid off about 20% of employees who worked primarily on its sustainability initiatives, The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica found. Roughly another 10% left voluntarily or were transferred to other jobs. The cuts to its sustainability staff of about 150 people were far deeper than Nike’s 2% reduction companywide and 7% reduction at its Oregon headquarters.”

Cool animation though.

Revised doodle from yesterday

Hmm… the render from yesterday was bugging me a bit so I went in and revised it a bit.

This is a composite of these three renders now which I think is more interesting. I dialed down the LUT a bit as well.

Houdini Doodle

And todays doodle sticks with motion blur as the primary component with some volumetric scattering added in.

New Work in the Wild: Specialized Stumpjumper 15

Oh man, this is rad. Did these rendered sets and retouching on the bike for the Specialized Stumpjumper 15. Renders were super fun! I really enjoy it when I get to create digital sets.

Podcast time: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Wild stuff here with MK-ULTRA, Mason and all sorts of strange tales. Takes a bit to get moving but then it starts to open up about 20 minutes in.

“Tom O'Neill is an award-winning investigative journalist. His book, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, is the culmination of a 20-year investigation, which unearthed information about the murders, the murderers, the prosecutors who tried them, and the complex web of connections between Charles Manson, the CIA's MKUltra program, the counterculture movement, and other powerful individuals during the 1960s.”

Houdini Doodle: Motion Blur Study

After testing out some extreme caustics the other day, I kinda wanted to get into some crazy motion blurs. I made three different kinds of motions here to get these effects. The biggest hiccup I had was that my render window in Redshift was showing the blur but the final Render wih Mplay was not. Turns out if you have a motion vector AOV turned on, it won’t render out. Dunno if that’s a bug or not. But was odd to trouble shoot.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

LOL! What a great write up, love this kind of humor.

“I. But We Will Realize Untold Efficiencies With Machine L-

What the fuck did I just say?

I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders1.”

“II. But We Need AI To Remain Comp-

Sweet merciful Jesus, stop talking. Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they're going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything - or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here's a secret, they didn't do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.”

It just keeps going like that. Yeah, I am of the camp that AI is the new NFT, 90’s .com crash coming.

Houdini 20.5 MPM - what is that?

Really good write up on Reddit about what MPM actually is in Houdini 20.5. Really good explainer here.

“When it comes to simulation currently in the industry there are a few major kinds of solvers - 1. Grid based (Eulerian solvers) 2. Particle based (Lagrangian solvers) 3. A mix of both (Hybrid / semi Lagrangian solvers) 4. There’s also a 4th kind, mostly point or geometry based (PBD solvers, Bullet, NVIDIA PHYSX). Although PBD can be categorised as Lagrangian too.

So what are Eulerian and Lagrangian solvers? In very simple words if you’re calculating and storing your velocities on the grid like bounding box that you use in FLIP fluids or pyro solvers basically solvers that use a voxel grid then it’s Eulerian. Example of such solvers are FLIP fluid and pyro solver in Houdini.

On the other hand if you compute and store velocities and forces on the particles instead of any VDB grid etc then it’s Lagrangian. Example of Lagrangian solver can be SPH (smooth particle hydrodynamics) probably was used in old versions of Bifrost, Real Flow etc. Currently not very famous or used. Probably the most common example of this method in Houdini is vellum which uses PBD (position based dynamics) or XPBD (extended position based dynamics) where velocities and forces are computed and stored in the grid.

As you may already know in both the methods you can simulate various materials to some extent like cloth, soft bodies, fluids, grains etc.

When I worked in Dune 2 we used FLIP solver extensively to create some of the sand shots while in other shots where it wasn’t necessary we used vellum grains or even particles.

But here comes the major problem. You can’t make Eulerian and Lagrangian solver talk to each other easily without creating a custom bridge.

So in order to do that, the solution is MPM or material particle method based solver. MPM uses both the characteristics of Eulerian solver and Lagrangian solver.

How?

In MPM you store the forces and velocities of a particle in the particle like you do in Lagrangian but then you interpolate that velocity back into a grid , solve the forces and then interpolate the forces / velocities back to the particles and move the particles.

Whereas is FLIP the whole velocity projection / Pressure projection stage happens in the grid itself.

MPM is sort of a hybrid solver. It was built as an extension of FLIP solver. While FLIP is very good at handling fluid behaviours by keeping the simulation divergence free, MPM is more of a general purpose solver that can handle stretch, strain, granular sims a lot better however it can also do fluids.

Now through MPM you can have a good interaction between various materials that you didn’t have before like cloth and fluid, grain and fluid etc.

Not only that in some cases like snow accumulation etc MPM can give a lot better results than PBD based solvers like vellum. However one drawback is that with MPM you’ll have to make bounding boxes like FLIP or Pyro solver which might not always be very memory efficient.”- Icy-Acanthisitta3299

Houdini 20.5 Keynote

It’s nice that there is still a technology / program that I am actually excited to use and learn about new stuff in. Houdini is STILL really interesting tech. Digi cameras are boring, Photoshop is a pile of broken glass, windows is bloatware and macs are boring. But this stuff still gets me excited.

Houdini Doodles: Cassette

Just messing around with some clouds and voronoi fracture which was not really working for me. So I shifted it up and went into doing a caustics study which I like more. Works pretty good now in Redshift and renders fast.